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NASA funds ion-powered flying drones to explore Saturn’s largest moon

NASA is funding an ambitious new concept that could send swarms of tiny, silent, spherical “aerobots” floating through the eerie underground caves of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

The project is called SPARK or Solid-state Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of Karst. Led by Daniel Drew, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, SPARK uses electrohydrodynamic (EHD) propulsion, commonly known as atmospheric ion thrusters.

As EHD thrusters are solid-state and silent, the tech offers omnidirectional maneuverability without generating heavy downwash that could disturb delicate surface layers.

Quantum Information Systems for Networking and Sensing

ICYMI: 🚀 HISTORIC FIRST FOR U.S. QUANTUM NETWORKING 🇺🇸⚛️

NASA just achieved a major milestone in high-security aerospace communication: sending a quantum signal from a flying aircraft directly to a ground station for the very first time in U.S. history.

During flight tests over Ohio, researchers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center locked onto single-photon quantum signals transmitted from a moving NASA Pilatus PC-12 aircraft to a optical receiver on the ground.

Why is this a big deal?

⚡ Uncrackable Physics: Traditional RF communications are vulnerable to eavesdropping and jamming. In a quantum network, information is encoded on individual particles of light (photons). Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, any attempt to intercept or observe the signal fundamentally alters its state—making covert tapping mathematically impossible.

📡 Breaking Out of the Fiber Trap: Fiber optic cables can only stretch so far before signals degrade. To build an unhackable, global quantum internet, we have to go wireless through open air—linking aircraft, high-altitude drones, and deep-space satellites directly to ground nodes.

Continue reading “Quantum Information Systems for Networking and Sensing” | >

A proof of the Aaronson‑Ambainis conjecture

A proof of Aaronson‑Ambainis conjecture.

* Physical Superintelligence (PSI) announced that its automated research system used an unreleased, non-public Anthropic model to prove the conjecture—a major open problem in quantum complexity theory and computing speedups that had remained unsolved since 2008.

* According to PSI, the AI system successfully generated a complete proof by its third day of operation, and the final proof was formally checked and verified using the Lean interactive theorem prover.

* The result sheds light on the exact conditions under which quantum computers hold an exponential advantage over classical computers, while also highlighting the performance gap between advanced internal AI research models and those currently available to the public.

Notes:

The (AA) conjecture, posed by Scott Aaronson and Andris Ambainis in 2008, addresses a fundamental question in theoretical computer science: When can a quantum computer run exponentially faster than a classical computer, and when is that exponential speedup impossible?

To understand the conjecture without getting lost in mathematical physics, it helps to look at how computer scientists evaluate quantum speedups through the Query Model (or “black-box” model).

Continue reading “A proof of the Aaronson‑Ambainis conjecture” | >

Inspired by honeycombs, a low-cost cooling structure lasts over 100 million cycles

As global demand for cooling continues to grow, the urgent need for sustainable refrigeration technologies is becoming increasingly evident. Conventional vapor-compression systems remain energy-intensive, while the refrigerants can contribute to the greenhouse effect. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) research team has manufactured a low-cost, ultradurable elastocaloric refrigerant structure, inspired by the stacked porous architecture of honeycombs, that operated for more than 100 million cooling cycles with an estimated service life of more than 10 years.

This manufacturing approach substantially increases production efficiency and reduces costs, paving the way for the practical deployment of elastocaloric cooling. The findings have recently been published in the journal Science under the title “Stacked porous NiTi structure with low cost and ultrahigh fatigue life for elastocaloric cooling.”

Reversible zinc oxidation as a route to on-demand hydrogen delivery

Reversible zinc oxidation, enhanced by lactate coordination, enables a self-sustained, circuit-free pathway for high-density hydrogen storage and delivery. By overcoming solubility limits under ambient conditions, this system delivers higher volumetric capacity and safety than existing carriers, providing a robust alternative to high-pressure infrastructure for decentralized, on-demand green hydrogen delivery.

‘Zeptoverse’: CERN scientists uncover evidence of extraordinarily rare particle decay

Scientists at CERN have found evidence of an extraordinarily rare particle decay, offering a glimpse into a largely unexplored world known as the ‘zeptoverse’

The discovery was made using the Large Hadron Collider, which smashes protons together to produce particles that scientists can study.

Researchers focused on beauty particles, short-lived particles created in these collisions. They found evidence of an extremely rare process in which one of these particles transforms into other particles, something predicted to happen just once in every 10 billion cases.

Design strategies for liquid metal-based soft electronics

Liquid metals (LMs) combine metallic electrical and thermal conductivity with soft, deformable mechanics for soft electronics. This Review highlights LM composite and structural material strategies, with a focus on interfacial design that enables stable, high-resolution patterning and reliable integration in wearable, implantable and soft robotic systems

Scientists achieve record-breaking low temperature on China’s space station, paving the way for new physics experiments

Matter starts to behave differently at extremely low temperatures, creating conditions ideal for studying quantum physics and new states of matter. Now, researchers from China have achieved a new low-temperature record aboard their Tiangong space station. Their research, recently published in Science, might lead to a new generation of experiments in quantum physics and precision measurements in space.

At temperatures near absolute zero, atoms can form a kind of cloud, called a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), that behaves as a shared quantum wave. BECs are valuable for physics research. The authors of the new study describe them as “versatile platforms for quantum simulation.” The colder atoms get, the more they slow down, allowing scientists to take better measurements. This has led to a quest for lower and lower temperatures.

But achieving extremely low temperatures near absolute zero can be difficult. Gravity creates restrictions by making atoms sag in the trap. Magnetic levitation has been used to counteract gravity, but it creates a new issue by forcing atoms to have the same internal spin state. Optical traps use laser beams and offer more flexible control, but they had not directly produced a condensate under microgravity conditions before the new study.